superleeds you can resummarize your questions for me if you'd like honest answers to them

Anyone who thinks living off the labor of others is wrong doesn't really belong in a poker forum.

This brings up an interesting point. In AC Land, does anybody do anything to prevent the ~3% of society prone to problem gambling from destroying their lives and inflicting havoc on society as a whole?

Speaking of that, are there any usury protections in AC Land? Sounds like loan sharking for the degens will be wicked profitable.

In AC land if the killer bees take over, whos gonna stop them?

Turn the AC up high enough and they'll freeze.

If you're going to go that route, then I'm going to adopt AC after all. Edison was clearly barking up the wrong tree, and Tesla was a much better engineer.

How does a problem gambler inflict havoc on society as a whole? What does that even mean?

Anyways, I suspect that no more or less would be voluntarily contributed to fighting gambling addiction than exists currently.

I'm glad that you can see that capitalism is exploitative on some level. And from that information alone I would surmise that you are pro-capitalism in the sense that yeah it has its flaws but it provides us with the best of all possible worlds or something along that line. I would guess that that would be the kind of argument you would make and imo that's a respectable argument. I mean obviously I'm not persuaded by it, as you can tell from my posts, but I do view it as an argument I can take seriously. In contrast, the ACists/right-libertarians try to deny that capitalism is exploitative altogether. IOW just an outright denial of reality--an argument that is impossible to take seriously.

Me too, in fact I would say that most of humanity falls into this category. People don't really voluntarily submit to wage labor. They're typically like you and I, they submit to wage labor because they HAVE to. As anarcho-syndicalist Jeff Stein pointed out:

Source.

Taking for granted everything you've said, I would point out that just because both sides benefit doesn't mean we should see the arrangement as legitimate. Using the "both sides benefit" logic, we could also conclude that sweatshop slavery is ok because the alternative (thanks to capitalist friendly state force) is often starvation. So the argument to me is very weak, if not just plain terrible, because it can be used to justify all kinds of oppressive relationships.

Yeah I don't really see a meaningful difference. In both cases, the private police or the public police will be principally serving the class interests of those who own society (that's how the world works). And we can also assume that not much will change on this front in AC-land. After all, in an unequal market system in terms of income and wealth where "market demands are in dollars, not votes"(David Friedman) the private police/mercenaries will be mostly serving the capitalist class since they "will have a higher effective demand than the working class and more resources to pay for any conflicts that arise."

Generally speaking, when it comes to public power or private power, I think one should be very leery of both. I suspect that the distribution of sociopaths is higher amongst the population of the presidents, other statesmen, CEOs, and other higher ups in the private/public system than in the general population. As Noam Chomsky put it: "wealth and power tend to accrue to those who are ruthless, cunning, avaricious, self-seeking, lacking in sympathy and compassion, subservient to authority and willing to abandon principle for material gain, and so on . . . Such qualities might be just the valuable ones for a war of all against all."

This reminds me of this parable:

Source.

lol

Fortunately for you right now you have a mechanism by which you can violently force other people to go along with whatever you personally believe. Enjoy it!

ILP,

Your theory on why capitalism is exploitative is rooted in the some of the greatest intellectual fallacies in history, namely Marxism.

The building blocks of Marxism rest of the following fallacies:

1) The exchange equality of value theory; Marx believed that two things exchanged must be equal in value, and that therefore some third benchmark value could be unveiled to objectively measure value. This is patently false of course. Two things are exchanged only when they have unequal values in the subjective appraisal of each party, and each party in the exchange gives up what he values less in exchange for what he values more from the other, and vice versa.

2) The Labor theory of value, or the cost theory of value; Marx believed in the Smith-Ricardo fallacy, rooted in Calvinist doctrine, that the value of a good is equal to the quantity of labor it took to make that good. This fallacy was predominant throughout Marx's life, and it was not universally overturned in the economics discipline until the 1870s. It does not excuse Marx's fallacious theory of value, the cornerstone of his now put-entirely-to-rest economic treatise. Marx's extension of this fallacy was to go on to say that only commodities are produced or are of any importance, casting aside non-productive services that his theory couldnt explain (exchanging labor for labor, wha?)..

There is of course no way to define a "quantity unit of labor" in any meaningful uniform sense, and even if there were, this knowledge would still fail to explain the diamond-water paradox, or explain any of the paradoxes the theory itself creates.

3) Marx believed that in a "just" world, prices will equal their cost of production. This concept explains why Marxist's succumb to exploitation fallacy. Prices of course are not purely a reflection of their cost of production. Marxists lack the element of time in their analysis. They fail to grasp that a market signal to produce a good, a.k.a. an attractive profit opportunity, exists because people are willing to work now in exchange for compensation later (entrepreneurs) and that because of the accumulated capital in society that is seeking an investment opportunity, funds exist for the entrepreneur that enable him to take a risk and compensate people now (employees), discounted for production later.

4) Marx believed in a homogenous class of workers, the working class, despite the fact that no such uniform class existed. In other words, steel workers in Pittsburgh are not in the same class as algo traders on wall street, despite the fact that both are "workers". The only true classes that can be delineated in our society are the economic class (people whose personal consumption is greatly of their own product) and the parasite class (people who live exclusively on the government dole).

No my point boils down to the fact that force and violence are part of human nature. With that in mind the natural order of things with humans is to form into groups with only the upper echelon of the hierarchy allowed to use force.

Once you have private interests who have the ability to use force they are going to use that force in their own interests. This will inevitably result in a violent war between Coke and Pepsi to determine domination over the beverage industry.

That last example is tongue and cheek though... Because the private security companies you guys credit for keeping the peace will simply fight each other for the right to extort territory where they will monopolize violence. That sounds a lot like government to me. The idea that someone who has the ability to use violence as a means to their ends is instead going to sit down and rationally negotiate a wonderfully great deal for people they could simply take from is laughable.

Government simply is a fact of human life. There is no moment in recorded history when humans haven't had a government of one kind or another. There's a reason for that.

So you're suggesting that labor in Marx's era was compensated fairly? That the upper echelon of society wasn't using their power to artificially lower the price of labor? Why is it ok for capital to gather together to actively smash labor in an organized way, but it's not ok for labor to gather together to smash capital?

I'm just guessing from your posts that you're aggressively anti union...

I bolded the things that aren't true and have absolutely no substantive evidence or support.

This is quite true. This doesn't mean that government is something that can be gotten rid of. Government at its root is really just whomever holds the natural monopoly on force. Some are more benevolent and well managed than others... But at the end of the day they're simply part of civilization.